Unconscious Archives - Page 2 of 5

Freedom from Choice

November 6, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 3 Comments

You always have a choice. At least that’s what many people believe. No matter what happens, you can choose how to respond. And if you want things to be different, all you have to do is make different choices.

It’s a highly appealing belief to hold, yet you may have found that making a different choice is often tantalizingly out of reach, even when you know exactly what you want to do differently. So what’s going on? If you don’t make a different choice, does that mean you really don’t want to? Does it mean you lack self-control or will power? Does it mean you’re trying to sabotage yourself?

If you believe that you could make a different choice but don’t, why don’t you?

When you fail to make a different choice, you’re forced to explain yourself—at least to yourself. The result is often the beginning of a vicious cycle of rationalization, excuse-making, or self-blame that can drag on for years or even decades. This is a waste of time and totally counterproductive to changing behavior.

The more we discover about the circuitry of the brain, the more the answers tip away from accusations of indulgence, lack of motivation, and poor discipline—and move toward the details of the biology. —David Eagleman, Incognito

The truth is that you don’t always have a choice. In fact, you rarely have a choice. You keep doing the same things you’ve always done because that’s how your brain is wired. It conserves precious energy by turning as many behaviors as possible into routines and habits. Once those routines and habits are in place, they’re extremely difficult to disrupt. When faced with a familiar situation, you will most likely do what you’ve always done in that situation, even if you want to do something else.

Minute by minute, second by second, the unconscious part of your brain is absorbing and processing an unbelievable amount of data, all but a small fraction of which you’re not consciously aware of. So at the moment you’re faced with that familiar situation, your unconscious has picked up on signals, made connections, and initiated the usual response all before you can consciously consider doing something different. When it comes to routines and habits, consciousness is simply no match for the speed and anticipatory responses of the unconscious brain.

Letting Go of the Illusion

It’s hard to give up our illusions about choice. We want to keep our options open instead of locking ourselves in. We want to be spontaneous. And we prefer to believe we’re exercising conscious choice, no matter how ineffective or detrimental those choices may be. As a result, we often refuse to make a commitment, even to something we really want or that really matters to us.

We repeatedly put far more trust than is warranted in our conscious brain’s ability to override our unconscious brain’s programming. We’re convinced that next time we’ll do things differently.

The reality is that keeping our options open really means leaving the outcome to chance. Yes, there’s a slim possibility that when the moment comes we’ll make a different choice. But the odds are not on our side. The unconscious operates automatically and at a much faster speed than the conscious part of our brain.

When we blame our inability to effect change in our lives on a lack of self-control or will power, our only option is to work on developing those mental muscles. That can be done, to a limited extent, but the source of the problem is not the lack of self-control and will power but our reliance them.

The situation is not hopeless, however. We’re not entirely at the mercy of the unconscious part of our brain. We do have a say in the matter. We can learn how to use both parts of our brain to our advantage instead of letting the unconscious have its way all the time.

But that requires changing the way we think about choice.

The concepts of freedom and choice seem to belong side by side. After all, what is freedom if not freedom to choose? The idea that we could be free, experience freedom, without also having and exercising the ability to choose is difficult to contemplate.

But Krishnamurti believed otherwise.

We think that through choice we are free, but choice exists only when the mind is confused. There is no choice when the mind is clear. When you see things very clearly without any distortion, without any illusions, then there is no choice. A mind that is choiceless is a free mind, but a mind that chooses and therefore establishes a series of conflicts and contradictions is never free because it is in itself confused, divided, broken up.

Decide Now so You Won’t Have to Choose Later

Changing behavior requires that you do something different ahead of time instead of counting on doing something different in the moment. Determine how you want to respond in a familiar situation when you have some distance from it and can think clearly about it instead of when you’re in that situation. And then make a pre-commitment. A pre-commitment eliminates the need to make a choice in the moment because you’ve already decided what you’re going to do.

Formulate a clear and specific intention.
Come up with a way to keep your attention focused on your intention.
Assume you won’t be perfect out of the gate. Your unconscious brain is stubborn and set in its ways. With perseverance, however, your desired response will become the automatic one.

By giving up your so-called freedom of choice, you greatly increase the likelihood you’ll do what you’ve decided you want to do in order to have the life you want to have.

How Quickly Can You Turn Success into Failure?

September 18, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 4 Comments

We don’t have to make a point of looking for what isn’t working or the places where we haven’t lived up to our expectations. Our brain automatically notices those things and points them out to us. It’s wired to pay more attention to negative events than to positive ones. That’s because while positive events may be extremely pleasurable and possibly even good for us, negative events could kill us or put us in grave danger. At least that’s how the unconscious part of the brain (System 1) perceives them. This automatic tendency is so universal it has a name: the negativity bias.

In and of itself, having a brain that points out what isn’t working or measures how far we missed the mark isn’t a bad thing. That kind of information is potentially very useful. It’s the way we over-value and respond to negative information that gets us into trouble. Because we have a brain that is primed to notice the negative, it’s easy for us to overlook the positive altogether, even when there’s plenty of positive for the eye to behold.

When Good Isn’t Good Enough to Qualify

Several of my clients are addressing health-related issues in my Goals, Habits & Intentions course. They have either set long-term goals to achieve specific results in terms of such things as diet and exercise or they are working on changing or creating habits that support the level of health and well-being they want to achieve.

One person who has diabetes is working on lowering her blood glucose level (which is measured by a test called the A1c). She decided to aim for lowering her A1c to a specific number and created a goal action plan to help her do that. She was following her plan just fine until she purchased a kit from a drugstore to do a home test and got a result that was better than the one she was aiming for.

At that point, she pretty much stopped following her plan. But when she got her official A1c test results back from the lab a few weeks later, they were disappointing. The number was not as low as the one she’d gotten from her home test. Her view of the situation was that she had failed—not just in continuing to follow that specific goal action plan, but in doing the Goals, Habits & Intentions coursework.

So I was surprised to learn that her A1c result was lower than it had been the last time she was tested. And the number last time she was tested was lower than it had been at the beginning of the year. From the first test to the third test, she had lowered her A1c by 1.6 points! By any objective measure, that’s a significant success. Instead of celebrating it, however, she discounted it. Her successful results were a failure in her own eyes because they weren’t quite as amazing as she’d thought they would be.

I suggested she make a visual chart that tracked her A1c numbers over the course of this year and put it up in a prominent location so the irrefutable evidence of her success would be harder to ignore.

The Default Response

This is a pernicious problem we all face: jumping to conclusions about the information provided to us by our brain and by external sources. It can happen at either end of the scale (“good” news or “bad” news), but the interesting thing is that the result of both good news and bad news is often the same: we stop whatever it is we were doing. And the culprit in both cases is System 1 thinking, which is focused entirely on the short term.

If the news is “good,” we stop because we think we achieved our goal so we don’t need to continue working toward it. That makes a certain amount of sense because that’s what you do when you actually achieve a goal. But in a lot of cases we need to set up a goal in order to change or start a habit so we can maintain our success. This is especially important in the area of health and wellness. If we want to maintain long-term changes, we can’t stop doing the things that are making us healthier. Instead, we need to turn them into habits. (As an aside, I read a blog post a couple of years ago by someone who set out to develop a 30-day habit of strength training. After the 30 days he decided he had been successful and didn’t need to do it any longer.)

If the news is “bad,” we use it as evidence of our poor character (lack of self-control, powerlessness, etc.) and of the pointlessness of our attempts. Why bother? Nothing works, anyway. The automatic tendency isn’t to evaluate what might have gone wrong, but to chuck the whole thing, thus guaranteeing failure and maybe even overlooking evidence of success.

Celebrate Success!

I used to be able to count on getting in several workouts at the gym each week. And I loved it. But at the beginning of this year, my daily schedule went bonkers and has stayed that way. After months of attempting to fit the gym into my new schedule, I traded the gym for walking every day because I can break walking into smaller segments of time and fit them into the breaks between classes and appointments. As September approached, I decided it was time to exchange a couple of days of walking each week for using the treadmill at the gym.

I went to the gym at the beginning of the first week, loved it, and thought I could probably get in not just one more visit but two that week. Nevertheless, I managed only the one visit. The same thing happened the next week and then the week after that. I noticed I had failed to follow through on my original intention. I noticed the impulse to interpret my once-a-week gym visits as a failure. But I also acknowledged I really hadn’t had an opportunity to get in more time at the gym, and I’d kept up my walking and even increased it. I reminded myself that baby steps and perseverance are an almost unbeatable combination. At the end of three weeks, I looked at the notations on my calendar and realized I’d gotten in three more workouts on the treadmill than I would have if I hadn’t set an intention.

In order to celebrate success, we have to notice it, which means not having a knee-jerk reaction to every realization we haven’t met or exceeded our expectations. The game is only over when we stop playing—and that is largely up to us.

When have you turned a success into a failure? What do you think you could do to change your perspective in those kinds of situations?

Feedback Loops: Use Them or Be Used by Them

July 17, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

It isn’t too much of a stretch to say that feedback loops make the world go round. Among other things, feedback loops keep machinery—both digital and analog—running smoothly, moderate our weather, and maintain homeostasis in our bodies. Feedback loops also function to either maintain or disrupt the status quo within businesses and other organizations, in politics, in the economy, in interpersonal relationships, and even in regard to our own behavior.

David DiSalvo calls feedback loops “the engines of your adaptive brain.” He says research across multiple disciplines—psychology, sociology, economics, engineering, epidemiology, and business strategy, for example—has validated feedback loops as a solid governing principle.

Day in and day out, we make decisions based on the results of feedback loops that run in our minds without our noticing. None of us stops to think through each stage of the loop—how the data we’ve gathered is being processed to lead us to our next action. And yet, even without our conscious monitoring, the loops just keep moving.

Decision-making requires conscious thought. So it may be more accurate to say we react based on feedback loops rather than that we make decisions. In the same way that our brain has criteria for evaluating the data provided by physiological feedback loops (in order to, say, maintain our body temperature and signal when we need to eat or drink—or stop eating or drinking), it also has criteria for evaluating the data provided by our mental, emotional, and behavioral feedback loops. The problem is that these criteria are part of our mental model of the world, much of which is unconscious, which means we’re not aware of it.

If we don’t stop to think through “how the data we’ve gathered is being processed,” we’re more likely to maintain the very habits of thinking and behaving we’re trying to change.

What Exactly Is a Feedback Loop?

The four stages of a feedback loop as described by science writer Thomas Goetz in Wired Magazine are:

Evidence
Relevance
Consequence
Action

A feedback loop involves four distinct stages. First comes the data: A behavior must be measured, captured, and stored. This is the evidence stage.

Second, the information must be relayed to the individual, not in the raw-data form in which it was captured but in a context that makes it emotionally resonant. This is the relevance stage.

But even compelling information is useless if we don’t know what to make of it, so we need a third stage: consequence. The information must illuminate one or more paths ahead.

And finally, the fourth stage: action. There must be a clear moment when the individual can recalibrate a behavior, make a choice, and act. Then that action is measured, and the feedback loop can run once more, every action stimulating new behaviors that inch us closer to our goals.

When it comes to behavior-related feedback loops, such as changing an old habit or starting a new one, the sequence looks more like this:

Action
Evidence
Relevance
Consequence
New Action (or Reaction)

Just about any activity generates feedback of some sort. The result of an action can be large or infinitesimal, desirable or undesirable. Ideally, you notice what happens and use the feedback to determine what to do next. If you’re driving your car along a snowy road and it begins to skid, the skid is evidence that road conditions require you to make some type of adjustment to your driving. The evidence is relevant to you because you want to avoid an accident, which is a potential consequence of not paying attention to the evidence. Your reaction might be to slow down.

That’s a fairly straightforward example. Another driving-related example, one you may have encountered and which Goetz wrote about in Wired, involves “dynamic speed displays,” also called driver feedback signs. These speed limit signs include radar sensors attached to digital readouts that flash your vehicle’s speed once you get in range. Driver feedback signs have been so successful in decreasing speeding they’re springing up in more and more locations.

The basic premise is simple. Provide people with information about their actions in real time (or something close to it), then give them an opportunity to change those actions, pushing them toward better behaviors. Action, information, reaction.

The Premise May Be Simple, But the Process Isn’t.

The apparent result of an action we’ve taken—the evidence—must first be interpreted before we can proceed through the steps of the feedback loop to determine how to react. A roadside sign that tells you both the speed limit and your current speed provides you with straightforward, unambiguous evidence. If all the evidence we were faced with was similarly unambiguous, our lives would be much less complex and our decisions would be much easier to make. Alas, such is not the case.

As stated above, DiSalvo says we make decisions based on the results of feedback loops, but even in cases where we’re making decisions rather than simply reacting, it would be more accurate to say we make decisions based on our interpretation of the results of feedback loops.

Because we perceive the world through our particular mental model, we’re predisposed to interpret the results of our actions in certain ways. This can be problematic in general, but it’s especially so when we’re presented with negative evidence. Things didn’t work out the way we planned; we did something other than what we intended or wanted to do; or we’re faced with unexpected obstacles. The most useful way to respond to such information is to look at it objectively. We tried something and it didn’t work. We can then try to figure out why it didn’t work and decide whether to try it again or to try something else.

Instead of viewing the negative results of our actions objectively, however, we’re prone to interpreting them as evidence of failure. Once we interpret the results as evidence of failure, we’re much less likely to try to figure out what didn’t work and what to do next, and we’re much more likely to give up. At that point, the habit or behavior we were trying to change becomes even more entrenched than it was before we attempted to do something about it. And the goal we were trying to achieve seems even more distant.

A student in one of my classes reported struggling for several years with a particular issue of having to document, in detail, time spent caretaking a family member. Every time she tried and failed to find a system that worked, she interpreted it as evidence of personal failure. One day in class, she outlined something new to try. When she returned the following week, she was very excited, but not because the new system had worked. It hadn’t. What she was excited about was that when she realized that particular system didn’t work, rather than viewing it as more evidence of failure she was able to view it objectively. Because she was able to view it objectively, she didn’t waste time beating herself up over it. Instead, she immediately decided to try something else and that new system did work.

Confirmation bias is very powerful. If we believe we’re lazy or incapable or don’t follow through on anything, we’re likely to view the negative results of our actions as confirmation of our preexisting belief and then behave as though that belief is reality. So it’s important to remember that our automatic interpretations can’t always be trusted; sometimes we need to slow down long enough to question them.

Not everything you try is going to go smoothly or work out the way you hoped it would. Sometimes the road is slippery, under construction, or takes a detour. Noticing that what you tried simply didn’t work will allow you to use the information as feedback to help you determine the best way to correct your course—or to chart a brand new one.

Grateful for My Brain: a 2014 Year-End Review

January 5, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell 5 Comments

Doing a year-end review has always been one of those things that seem like a good idea but which I never quite get around to. This past year was unique in a number of ways, and so I decided—almost on the spur of the moment—that it would be prudent and productive to spend some time evaluating what happened.

I’m a huge fan of list-making, so instead of using any of the many different tools, processes, and resources available, I conducted my review in the form of making several lists. This turned out to be so helpful that I’ve already put it on my calendar to do again at the end of 2015.

Here are my list headings:

What I accomplished

This was by far the longest of my lists. Because I have a tendency to dismiss what I have done in order to berate myself for what has yet to be done, making this list helped me stop and smell the roses a bit. It gave me greater perspective on the multiple endeavors I’ve been engaged in. It also showed me the areas where my attention was focused—and the areas where it wasn’t.

What I didn’t anticipate

There’s no question that this was the most useful of my lists. The more than two dozen things I hadn’t anticipated—roughly half positive and half negative—not only had a significant effect on my life in general and what I was able to accomplish, they also provide concrete evidence that I can’t predict the future no matter how much my brain wants me to believe I can. We can—and should—plan ahead, but it’s important to remember that getting from here to there is rarely a straight line. Randomness and luck often play a larger role in both process and outcome than we’d like to acknowledge.

What worked

It was good to recognize what I’m doing right so I can keep doing more of that.

What didn’t/doesn’t work

It was also good to recognize mistakes I’ve made, opportunities I’ve missed, or areas that need major or minor tweaking.

What I’m grateful for

In addition to many other things—and people—I’m grateful for my amazing brain (yours is equally amazing, of course) and all the fantastic tricks it can do. Read to the end to see what my brain did with the material from my year-end review.

What I learned

One thing I learned is that I have a lot more to learn! But it was illuminating to see how much more I know now than I knew at the beginning of last year. It gives me hope and also some confidence in the face of the always uncertain future. Here’s actual evidence that I figured out how to do quite a few new things, so it’s likely I’ll be able to figure out how to do more things I don’t yet know how to do.

What I’m not satisfied with or what needs more attention

This list helped me focus on where to put my attention now. It was the last 2014 list, which made it relatively easy to complete and included a couple of surprises. I’m pretty sure it would have been more difficult to hone in on these things if I had started with this category, and I might not have seen things as clearly.

I created just two lists for 2015:

What I want to have happen this year

15 things that are sort of a hodgepodge of goals, intentions, and hopes. This list and the list of what I’m not satisfied with are the foundation of my short-range (3-6 months) planning process.

4 habits I want to keep; 4 habits I want to improve or change; 4 habits I want to start

Again, it was useful to identify what I’m doing that’s working before listing what I want to change (what isn’t working so well). I limited each category to 4 to keep it manageable. A limit of 3 might be even better.

I worked on these lists in bursts of time over several days, so the content was on my mind—and in my brain—throughout that period. As the brain tends to do, mine started looking for solutions for some of the bigger problems I’d identified. And not just during the day! One very long night, I was unable to fall asleep because I couldn’t stop trying to figure everything out logically (as illogical as I knew it was to be doing that in the middle of the night—or maybe ever).

Then, in one of those sudden moments of clarity I’ve come to know and love, the solution to one of the problems just showed up (thank you, System 1!), and as soon as it did, I realized that particular solution also took care of two other problems. I hadn’t even seen the three things as being connected. At that point, I immediately fell asleep, only to be awakened by the alarm clock an hour and a half later.

In the clear light of another day, and after a decent night’s sleep, the solution that appeared in the wee hours that morning seems both obvious and elegant. But had I not laid the groundwork for it by focusing my attention on all these areas of my life, I doubt I’d even have been able to identify the problems. And even if I had identified them, I’d probably be trying to find individual solutions for each of them—using the slow, logical part of my brain.

The moral of the story (which I should have tattooed somewhere on my body, sans parenthetical expressions and asides): Use System 2—the conscious part of your brain—to lay the groundwork, and then give System 1 an opportunity to do its thing (which includes seeing patterns, making connections, and putting the pieces together) to come up with a creative solution System 2 can only stand back, figuratively speaking, and admire.

Intuition: Knowing without Knowing How We Know

November 12, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell 4 Comments

Intuition goes by many names: hunch, gut feeling, instinct, inkling, inner voice. Malcolm Gladwell refers to it as “rapid cognition.” Cognitive psychologist John Bargh calls it “automatic processing.”

No matter how we label it, what intuition is is the ability to “know” something without knowing how we know it.

One thing intuition is not is magical or mysterious or superior in some way to rational, logical thinking. It’s just different. The world is not divided into people who are intuitive and people who are not. We all rely on intuition every day.

Intuition is the result of the associative thinking that takes place in the unconscious (System 1). The unconscious sees patterns and connects dots our conscious brain (System 2) isn’t even aware of. It operates quickly and it’s always on. That’s because, by the way, it’s what keeps us alive. And keeping us alive is what our brain is designed to do. System 1 makes rapid-fire assessments and communicates them to System 2. When we become consciously aware of one of those assessments, we call it intuition. We could also call it jumping to conclusions.

Jumping to conclusions on the basis of limited evidence is important to an understanding of intuitive thinking. System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions. —Daniel Kahneman

System 1 reacts exactly the same way (jumps to conclusions) whether we have a clue or not. So sometimes its assessments are accurate and sometimes they’re not. Intuition is good for making short-term predictions when it’s based on training, experience, and practice. But even when the training, experience, and practice are in place, intuition is not good for making long-term predictions or forecasts. There are just too many unknown variables for it to account for.

There are a number of potential problems related to relying on intuition. One is that System 1 processing is highly context-dependent. That means that whatever is going on at the time—the weather, our state of mind, the time of day, the last thing we ate—can influence our thoughts. So an intuitive assessment reached under one set of temporary circumstances could be entirely different from the one reached under a different set of circumstances.

Another problem is that good intuition in one area of our lives where we have expertise doesn’t carry over to other areas where we don’t have comparable expertise.

A third and bigger problem with intuition is the strong feeling of confidence it often engenders, whether or not that confidence is warranted, because that sense of confidence is all too easy to confuse with clarity.

What You Can Do:

Don’t automatically assume your intuitive guesses are accurate across the board. Just because you feel confident about something doesn’t mean you’re right. If you are skilled or knowledgeable in an area, your intuition is more likely to be accurate—at least when it comes to short-term predictions. But if you have no particular skill or knowledge, your intuition isn’t any better than a wild guess.

As Kahneman says, “Do not simply trust intuitive judgment—your own or that of others—but do not dismiss it, either.”

Additional Reading: How Important Is Your Need to Be Right? and Do You Confuse Clarity with Certainty?